My rough week was smoothed out quite a bit this evening by Capitol City Opera Company‘s “Summer of Song.” This was a concert of art song performed by soprano Rachel Eve Holmes accompanied by music director Catherine Giel on piano. The program featured works by Giuseppe Verdi, Gabriel Faure, Amy Beach, and Richard Strauss, all of which were performed capably and were a joy to hear.
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There is no way to read William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” as being anything short of antisemitic. A significant part of the play is people expressing their disdain for Shylock not for any character flaw — of which he has many — but solely for being a Jew. As an Ashkenazic man who was raised Jewish, I found myself curious as to what is so great about this play that it is worth disparaging an entire people just to stage it so I went to the Shakespeare Tavern to see Atlanta Shakespeare Company’s performance directed by Laura Cole.
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I concluded my experience of the Atlanta Fringe Festival this afternoon with Roots Dance Project‘s “7 Deadly Sins.” I enjoyed their show last year and I have to say that it was my favorite show that I saw at the festival this year. Roots is a contemporary ballet company formed for the festival and made up of dancers from a variety of companies in a variety of cities. This program, as the title implies, was made up of pieces that each took as their respective themes one of the seven cardinal sins from Christian theology.
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Braving the heat, a friend of mine and I went out to see “Infinite Expectation of the Dawn,” a Giant Nerd Productions show written, directed, and performed by L. Nicol Cabe and presented as part of the Atlanta Fringe Festival. The first of two things that made me choose to see this was that it was billed as a science fiction story set in a dystopian near future, which is something that I thought that my companion and I would find interesting. The second was that it is a solo performance piece written, directed, and produced by a woman in a world of theater where women playwrites and directors are still often given the shaft for no other reason than their lack of a Y chromosome and this person is bringing this show from Seattle, WA all the way to Atlanta, GA. To be frank, I feel that putting oneself out there for a solo show like this is a pretty tough thing to do even without being of a class that suffers discrimination in this field and in an unfamiliar city and the least that I can do to support that kind of bravery is to sit in a chair and let someone try to entertain me with a story that already sounds like it’ll be pretty interesting.
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I just took a wild ride into “The Mysterium” with Keith Bourdreau and Erica Valen of Mysterium Productions as part of the Atlanta Fringe Festival. I’m not a huge magic aficionado but do I love a good show and, of course, a good magic show has less to do with the illusions and more to do with putting on a good show. Bourdreau and Valen’s charming, delightful, and fun production definitely made for a good show.
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The ASO, conducted by Peter Oundjian, didn’t dilly dally this evening and got straight to the concerto: Philip Glass’ Violin Concerto No. 2, “The American Four Seasons.” Notable about this performance is that Oundjian and the soloist, Robert McDuffie, premiered the piece in late 2009 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which had co-commissioned it. The only commercial recording of which I’m aware, with McDuffie soloing with the London Philharmonic under Marin Alsop, makes its way regularly into my CD rotation. Needless to say, I was pretty excited when I found out that it was not only programmed for this season, but that it would be Oundjian conducting it with McDuffie soloing.
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After a tiring week and with a mild headache, I spent my Friday evening watching the MAD Festival at the Balzer Theater at Herren’s. The evening began well with “A Waltz for the End of Our Time,” choreographed by Douglas Scott for Full Radius Dance. This was the only work on the program to have live musical accompaniment, which was provided by a trio called Flight of Swallows on violin/banjo, guitar, and cello. The piece presented a sense of always moving forward without really having a specific narrative. I was particularly impressed by some fairly athletic partnering between Laurel Lawson and Rebekah Pleasant as well as the shapes that the remaining three dancers formed as they worked together. It was a good start to the festival and lifted my mood dramatically as I anticipated seeing the rest of the show.
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